Free Raising A Soul Surfer by Rick Bundschuh, Cheri Hamilton Page A

the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the
far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast
.
PSALM 139:9-10,
NIV
     

    I spent a night in jail for eating evidence.
Allegedly, it was a very, very small pot plant. Not a leaf, but a seedling. Oddly enough, it wasn’t even mine, nor was I actually in trouble over it; it was just the final straw in a series of misadventures. But if I hadn’t been thrown in jail; if I hadn’t destroyed that miniscule piece of evidence that wasn’t even against me; and if I hadn’t been mad and maybe just a little crazy, I might never have decided to leave California for Hawaii.
    Going back in time to Ocean Beach, my boyfriend had abandoned me and moved to Mammoth with his friends. Broken-hearted, I struggled to pay the rent as I worked at the Homestead health food restaurant, the very same restaurant my future husband frequented. But it would be far too simple a story for me to have noticed him then. I was too focused on everyday life, either at work or in the water, even though he often surfed the same spots I did.
    It was a very lonely time for me. I felt as if I were not tethered to anything. And because I was young and maybe a bit naïve, I imagined that if I went up to Mammoth, I could patch things up with my ex-boyfriend—even though he had told me in his letter that we were over.
    I moved out of my cottage and drove my little Karman Ghia up to Mammoth Mountain. Tony’s friends had put a wall between us, so I ended up renting a room in a house from a guy who was managing it for the owners. I soon found a job punching lift tickets. You could say that things were a bit strained. There were plenty of people my age, many of them surfers when not on the slopes; and while I was busy with work, I still managed to get in my fair share of skiing. In the end, the challenge of becoming a good skier overrode the relationship woes that had brought me to the mountain.
    There was a couple that rented the room next to me. I hardly ever saw them, and I never talked to them; but I’d hear them arguing at night or just making a racket. Their schedule was unpredictable; they came and went at weird hours, sometimes disappearing for days on end. Unlike the typical friendly folks in this small mountain town, they were extremely private.
    One day, I ran into my fellow boarder as he rushed out of his door to use the bathroom. He nodded quickly at me, never saying a word. His hand was wrapped in a rough bandage with blood seeping through.
    Later that afternoon, as I was coming home from work, police had surrounded the house. They had his girlfriend, but she wasn’t in custody, because he was the one they wanted. It turns out that he was a bank robber and had been shot through the hand during his last hold-up. They had finally tracked him back here, the house where I lived, through the license plates on his stolen RV!
    The sheriff interrogated me. “Did you know him? What was he doing here?” I explained that my housemates had been a total mystery to me. This situation now made a whole lot more sense to me.
    The next day, I was asked to come down to the police station, and I assumed it was to make a statement about my former housemate, the bank robber. But I was whisked into an interrogation room and grilled about the alleged pot plants the police had found on the landlord’s porch.
    “What pot plants?” I asked, because I truly had no idea that the landlord was growing pot. That’s when they brought out these two plants no bigger than my thumbnail.
    The officers started to increase the pressure. They wanted me to tell them that my landlord was part of a drug ring and that he was growing marijuana. I’d never seen any sign that he was dealing drugs, and I wasn’t about to get him in trouble for something that I had no knowledge of.
    After turning the screws without results, one of the officers said (just like in a bad police drama), “We’ll give you some time